Peppers are harvested by hand pickers as well as by machines. Machine pickers reduce the cost of picking thereby making peppers available for consumption at a relatively low cost. Hand pickers are freed for higher paying tasks that can not be accomplished by machines.
Crops are harvested by whole crop harvesters that remove the entire plant from the roots and run the plant material through a separating and cleaning assembly. Whole crop harvesters have not been acceptable for peppers. They leave too much plant material mixed with dried peppers. Fresh peppers mature over a period of time. As a result a substantial portion of a crop would be lost if fresh peppers of various varieties were harvested by a whole crop harvester.
Machine harvesters for peppers that remove the fruit and leave the plant standing have been used for some years. These harvesters harvest the fruit and leave most of the stalks, stems and leaves in the field when harvesting fresh peppers as well as dried peppers.
Successful self propelled mechanical harvesters that remove fruit from two or more rows of plants simultaneously are known. The plant rows are generally a minimum of 400 meters long. The machines require a uniform distance between rows. Relatively large transport equipment is required to transport the fruit from the field. The transport equipment and harvesters require substantial space to turn around at each end of the rows. These machines tend to lose too much crop in high production areas where hand pickers have been used for centuries, and agronomy practices have not been modified to accommodate relatively large machines. Farms as well as individual fields are often too small to justify the cost of a self propelled harvester and the transportation systems required to move harvested fruit from a high capacity harvester to a processing facility.